See, there is the one thing you shouldn't do if you want to have a civilised discussion instead of building strawmen. You didn't even take a single sentence out of context, you chose to cut away the actual reason from the very same sentence, well done.

The point was the ring 3 to ring 0 privilege transfer, which was only possible because it was allowing running arbitrary code through its interface, which was part of the way their copy-protection works.

I don't have any beefs with copy-protection. However, I'm not fond of programs that silently install themselves in place of the drivers I used previously, and gloriously fuck up things so that I had to take half a day to bring things back to normal. Oh, and on top of that, leave my system wide open to all kinds of tampering. Woohoo.

I don't think I can clarify my opinion any more than that, so that will probably be my last post in the topic, unless some new points are brought up.

Hmm, you seem to have the beta version of the box. The actual retail one looks like this:

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Because it's the decent thing to do to pay the people who spend time and energy in making the game?

Back on topic of the shareware: a long time ago passed the days of games like Commander Keen or Doom, which I consider real shareware. Those were really the times of shareware.

But since then it died. Shareware is mostly used (when even) in normal applications and not games. The only game which could be considered shareware nowdays (as far as I know) is Defcon - though it's not shareware in the full meaning - you download a demo, pay a fee, get a key and voila you have full version.

Edit:
Tobias: and if somebody does it, you can still get your money, when somebody want's to put it to a CD collection.

So if ever a pirated copy, only for free.

As per my second paragraph

Exactly. I acquired a free copy of Oblivion, after hearing it had no copy protection. I wanted to try it out, see if it'd even run on any of the systems here, and see if I enjoyed it. And you know what? It ran, I enjoyed it, and now I own a legit copy.

So in fact, they gained a sale by not using copy protection.

Everyone here is talking about the rootkits. What about the original question?

I have one idea that someone mentioned earlier but that I just wanted to re-emphasize:

1) Create a disabling feature on your full-feature game.
2) Prompt for the registration code
3) Don't test the registration code while the program is currently running! (A debugger could step through the memory and figure out the "check the given code against the correct hash" routines)
4) When they restart the program, do a check sometime in here that doesn't seem obvious (like, ask for user-input for mouse, keyboard, etc. and do the registration-check during that time)
5) If the code passes the hash BUT is considered a fake, delete a "needed" file in the game's current directory, or randomize its data so it can't be read. That guarantees that the program can't run.

You could do several of these "small, crippling" over a period of 3-4 "game restarts", so it's not completely obvious what's going on.

Anyway, my 2 cents...;D

Personally, I'm going the online route if I ever get a game worth buying out there. You need to login to play, can't login without a user name and password, can't get a user name and password without buying a subscription.

Remember that legitimate users can make mistakes. You should test the md5 hash of the executable files and disrupt their play if they do not match, don't test against their registration code.

For me and you maybe. But normally the users simply don't care about who make the game and how. They just want to run the game and screw up the rest of the world. So if they go choose if they will pay a expensive legit copy or if they will get a very cheap or even free pirated copy AND the pirated runs so well as the original does (or even better), so they will get the pirated, because no one really cares about the work the developers spent making it, they just want to get the software for the cheapiest price as they can (possibly for free).

This is why copy protection were implemented: to prevent that the pirated copy runs as well or better than the original one (or possibly simply did not run).

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There are also a geographic question in selling software. If the software is "US only" or "US/Canada only" or "north america and europe only" or "japan only" or "any non-worldwide region only", people outside these areas hardly will get a legit copies, and they probably will need to pirate these.

The places where geographic factors make piracy go high are places as:

1. North Korea and Cuba, due to being highly isolated politically and commercially, their software is 100% pirate.

2. Vietnam, Taiwan, China, Russia and arabian countries. International copyright laws don't have effect in those countries (and they benefit from that), so the piracy is high. There is no or very few support from developers, so they almost couldn't get legit copies even if they want.

3. Some african countries, latin-american countries. Although the inernational copyright affect these places, they are weak. The main cause of their weakness is the lack of support from the producers or inviability to sell legit software in these places (due to commercial protecionist barries, high taxes, economical instability, defective laws, etc.) Without (or with very few) support and with no chance or few chance to get legit copies, they tend to go in pirated ones.

Yes. But you have still violated the copyright.

The car analogy doesn't hold, though. If I "pirate" a car, the legit owner cannot use it any more. If I "pirate" software, the legit owner can use it just the same.
Pirating software is likely to hurt sales, while stealing cars may even have the opposite effect.

I just want to say that there are still many people who will actually buy a game. So even if there will be pirated copies the company will still profit if the game is good enough (just waiting till somebody tells me that I'd speak different if running my own game company). But if you obtain a pirated copy from a friend nobody loses nothing as Kitty said, the only issue is that you violate a copyright and you have to live with that that you're using somebody's work without giving him reward for it.

That's why I have today bought Homeworld 2, I had a pirated copy, found out that it works so I bought it. I found on the box that it is not 100% compatible with integrated cards and notebooks, so I'm glad I had a full version to test. The only thing I hate about that copy is that it has been translated to czech. I wish you could see how they translated destroyer - not in the alternate meaning of a ship but in the meaning of 'destructor'. And they proudly call it "Professional Czech version", ahem...